It's not the calling Jeannette Halton-Tiggs had envisioned for this time of her life, but when her kid killed a cop in 2007, she knew her plans and her passions were going to change.

Halton-Tiggs had struggled as a teen mother. She had been married and divorced by 18. She had two kids with her husband before she left the violent marriage. She never received any formal education. She had spent her entire adult life working as a server at restaurants around town. It was a life.

As the mother of a killer, a cop killer no less, Halton-Tiggs decided that she could no longer live behind a self-imposed wall of silence because of her embarrassment about her son, who early on showed signs of schizophrenia. She decided then that she would become a voice for other parents with mentally ill children -- parents who felt the same embarrassment and sense of helplessness that she did.

"What happened out in Tucson last weekend is probably no different than what happened when my son shot officer West. You had a mentally ill young man, with easy street access to a gun, who could have been stopped, if he had been identified, diagnosed and properly treated," Halton-Tiggs told me Thursday as she prepared for an interview with MSNBC

"As soon as I heard about the Arizona shooting, I wondered if this was someone with an agenda or someone who was sick and in need of treatment," she said.

A lot has changed for Halton-Tiggs since she received the urgent call on a Saturday morning saying that her 27-year-old son had killed officer West the night before in an unprovoked street encounter.

She now has an idea of how many Americans struggle daily with mental illness -- their own or in loved ones.

She now has an idea of how American laws and health care policies have inexplicably approached physical health and mental health separately instead of understanding how they are intertwined.

She now has an idea of how mental health issues receive serious public discussion only when tragedy strikes, as it did in Arizona on Saturday.

"The overwhelming majority of mentally ill people are no physical threat to anyone, and that includes schizophrenics," Halton-Tiggs said, sounding like someone who has worked to educate herself on the subject matter.

"But we have to do a better job of identifying the mentally ill who are violent and we have to get them off the street and into treatment. I'm not saying we should violate people's rights because they are mentally ill. But the rest of us also have a right to be safe from those who show signs of being dangerously unstable."

Timothy Halton pleaded guilty to murder in 2009 and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Now that he is a permanent ward of the state, he is getting the mental health treatment he had desperately needed since childhood.

That irony is not lost on his mother.

"Officer West is dead, and I've lost my son for life. But now Timothy is getting mental health care in prison. What's wrong with this picture?"

That's a great question.

It deserves an answer.

How many more innocents must die at the hands of the desperate and treatable sick?

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